Two things seemed to dominate
Mobile World Congress this year, the internet of things (IoT) and conversational commerce.
It seemed that every booth had a “connected car” to demonstrate the power of IoT. And if they could not fit a car in, they at least had a “connected scooter.”
Even
PayPal was in the connected car business via an amazing partnership with Jaguar and Shell, which will allow you to buy petrol from the dashboard computer at Shell gas stations around the UK.
But for me, the connected car is not the real story. Sure it’s convenient when you don’t have to pull out your wallet to pay for gas in your own car. What’s truly game changing is when it’s not your car, but one you have rented for the day (or the hour) and IoT automatically configures everything to your specifications and logs you directly into the onboard computer to pay for your gas, tolls or ham sandwich as you drive around the Barcelona countryside.
Over the next decade and beyond, the new commerce experiences that will emerge are going to be defined by their ability to bring in even more context, such as personalization and engagement, making the overall experience even more seamless. As everything becomes connected to the Internet, anything can become a payment device.
It won’t be convenient or realistic to pull out a credit card or punch in your information in any of these scenarios, whether a device is strapped to your face, your drone is meters away making a pickup or if your self-driving car is approaching a drive-thru.
The common thread across all these new experiences is that the user won’t be using keyboards as much and will demand that applications know enough about “you” to work without your input. We are seeing the beginnings of this with voice commands and devices like Amazon Echo, Apple’s Siri, Google Home and Microsoft Cortana but even these do not provide enough context automatically yet.
Consumers are continuing to want the same simplicity of buying stuff across all their devices regardless of hardware, operating system or input method. The commerce experience can become almost entirely driven by context. It's that point that makes me so excited PayPal is delivering on our strategy to become the world’s leading and largest open and independent digital payments platform, driving the global transition to digital payments.
I have no idea which of these future shopping ideas will become an everyday reality and which will still look like an episode of the Jetsons 10 years from now but what is clear is that the pace of technology-driven innovation is accelerating.
We live in a world that is consuming and churning out innovations faster than ever. However, even with all of the big data and algorithms on hand, there is still the need to not get caught up in just what’s possible with the technology and get closer to really understanding our customers’ challenges, aspirations and their real pain points to ensure we are focusing on the right problems that people around the world really need to be solved.
….Now tell Rosie my robot butler to fire up the flying car. We are going shopping.